Fred Hebert is an Erlang enthusiast based in the unexplored Northern
parts of Quebec (relatively speaking). He is so enthusiastic, in fact, that he
started writing Learn You Some Erlang
for great good! a free online book designed to teach Erlang, functional
programming and basic computer science concepts.

He started his career working with backend services for medium to large scale web sites, but php just did not do it. In 2010 Erlang Solutions came to the rescue! He worked with course development, e-learning, and Erlang training for a year with topics ranging from basic Erlang, advanced OTP down to TDD. He then moved on to BLOOM Digital Platforms as an Erlang developer, working on their Real Time Bidding gateway as an Erlang programmer.

When advertisers want to buy advertisement, they can do it at large on some user group and hope to get decent results, or participate in Real Time Bidding (RTB). In RTB, advertisers bid on individual advertisement spaces to obtain more targeted audiences. This is usually built on the backbone of large exchanges where bidders require high performance, short response times, and a high volume.

BLOOM 's AdGear platform is a service offering (along other things) a unified interface that offers media buying capability over ad exchanges, as well as traditional third-party ad delivery and trafficking. An Erlang gateway is used to route dozens of thousands of queries per second from and to exchanges and ad agencies.

In this talk, we explain why we chose Erlang, and give insights in our design and architecture, including things that were learnt while developing it, chases for bottlenecks and glory.

Talk objectives: To share/gain experiences in using Erlang for highly concurrent soft-real time systems.

Target audience: somewhat experimented Erlang programmers wanting to learn or share about production systems using the language.